Tag Archives: e-learning

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We had our share of excursions into E-Learning in the past few weeks, today it is time to recap and look into the attitude differences in the international business sector. We have very briefly touched on the happy variety of localization practices, so in our current post, we take a peek at the needs of organizations in a bit more detail.

Broadly speaking, E-Learning targets range from materials for internal use to assets devised for public audiences. It is not by any means a universal rule, but there is a pattern that the required level of adaptation corresponds to the objectives, and the degree of localization gets toned down as the focus shifts from external to organization-wide application.

The past decades have seen a gradual shift in education paradigms. The interconnectedness of today is greatly contributing to a change in how the concepts of knowledge and skills are perceived and defined – lexical knowledge is considered less and less to be the measure to go by while demand for new skill sets keeps emerging. The versatility of e-Learning renders it suitable for a variety of applications from distance training to highly-specialized proprietary knowledge transfer, yet they may all have the same weak spot in terms of localization.

In the finale of our first series about E-Learning focusing mainly on language engineering, Word is our protagonist, the arch adversary to xml-based localization. Microsoft has been taking steps towards reinventing Word as a mature document processing tool, but its legacy still bogs it down and prevents it from being a full-fledged content management solution. After 30 years, it is still green around the gills. Mentioning Word in the same paragraph with the concept of content management might sound off to you who are familiar with Word’s capabilities, design and purpose; however, it is still in widespread use for creating localization-sensitive material and documentation due to its accessibility and soft learning curve.

In our previous post, we floated the idea of how multilingual adaptation of a certain type of E-Learning content can be managed. We’ve chosen a poster child for meticulousness; however, more straightforward materials may not need such an approach. But let’s push forward with investigating a complex case, and look into the technical localization of MS Office content.

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espell LABS

Capitalizing upon the expertise accumulated over 30 years, espell LABS develops custom-tailored back-end architectures for partners and clients of espell in the areas of project management, software and localization engineering, machine translation solutions, DTP and quality assurance. We keep the concepts of interoperability and modularity in high esteem to ensure easy application of already established methods and tools to various scenarios.